HOWTO: How to Configure Printing to PPA Printers Through Jet Direct

Printing to Print Performance Architecture (PPA) printers through Jet Direct boxes is fully supported, as long as the Jet Direct box is properly configured.

There are numerous error messages that can be generated from the an incorrectly configured Jet Direct box. A couple of common errors for an already defined printer, where the configuration was reset for a Jet Direct device, would be either of the following: Problems can be as simple as a printout that is not formatted correctly to an inability to set up a remote port for the Jet Direct printer device. Common practice in trouble shooting printer problems should include a check on the Jet Direct's configuration.

Each Jet Direct card will have its own method for verifying and changing the configuration of the Jet Direct devices. The steps are generally found in the owner's manual and most vendors now have Web sites where this information and any updates may be found at. For example Hewlett Packard's Web site has important information on configuration of its devices.

Properly configured means the following:

• Configure the HP Jet Direct device for Centronics, and verify that the box has been power cycled if the configuration was changed from either Bitronics or MLC mode.
• For Windows NT 4.0, the the driver must be a unidirectional driver. This is generally the case for Windows NT with PPA printers.

Windows NT 4.0 will not support connecting a PPA device directly to the Windows NT computer. Using third-party OEM drivers that print to an external Jet Direct box and following the directions above will allow Windows NT to print to a PPA device.

For additional information, see the following article or articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: